To the extent it’s a controversial claim, it’s controversial because we don’t like calling U.S. presidents war criminals, not because it’s a difficult question whether obliterating entire areas inhabited by large civilian populations with the flimsiest of military targets as a pretext should now be regarded as a war crime.

Sanchez is correct that it isn’t a difficult question as far as law and morality are concerned. War crimes are not justified or obviated by necessity–necessity is almost always the rationale governments use to explain why they committed war crimes. As Stewart’s pathetic backtracking shows, however, it continues to be a politically charged and risky thing for a prominent public figure to claim. Politically and as a matter of retaining viewers, Stewart may be right that acknowledging the nuclear bombings to be war crimes was “stupid,” since there is no upside or popularity in saying so publicly, but Stewart’s own recantation is a good example of how perverse and distorting the prevailing “judgment of history” can be. Judged by any consistent standard of treatment of non-combatants in wartime, mass incineration must surely rank as a far worse crime than the very serious crime of torturing prisoners.

Because the prevailing view of Harry Truman and his decisions at the present time happens to be favorable, we are all supposed to believe that the “judgment of history” has “vindicated” Truman. This is a nice way of saying that propaganda and hero worship have overcome moral reasoning, and time has caused the moral horror of even a significant part of the American right in the 1940s to fade from memory. This favorable view of Truman is inextricably tied up with the cult of the presidency, our depressing but all too human habit of praising bad wartime leaders at the expense of better peacetime executives, the mythologizing of WWII (and therefore the minimizing or justifying of any wrongdoing on the Allied side) and the implicit devaluing of Japanese civilian lives every defense of both fire-bombing and nuclear strikes includes. None of this seems to occur to the people who continue to glorify Truman and to use Truman as an example of how tainted, bad Presidents may yet be viewed as great successes by posterity. What Truman’s posthumous rehabilitation should tell us is that half-truths and falsehoods, if repeated often enough, can become widely accepted, and that virtually no American political leader, no matter how many blunders he made and no matter what criminal acts he ordered, is beyond redemption at the hands of later sympathetic people who find that leader’s decisions to be useful precedents for their own preferred course of action. The “judgment of history” has, for the time being, ruled in favor of Truman, and therefore challenging this judgment is something to be mocked.

Stewart might reflect on the truth that a “complicated decision in the context of a horrific war” could be applied to many crimes ordered and carried out by governments in wartime. If we aspire to hold America to a standard according to which “we don’t torture,” one might think the same concern for human dignity and justice would also require us to say, “We are America–we don’t incincerate civilians, and we certainly don’t do it en masse.” Or, rather, we know full well that this has been done in our name many times in the past (and certainly not just at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but we should also be able to say that this was wrong and should never be done again. Pro-life Christians who remind us of the Massacre of the Innocents to protest the terrible crimes committed against the unborn must be able to see the same Massacre in the gratuitous nuclear annihilation of the center of Japanese Christianity. It is when convenience and so-called necessity are most tempting that adhering to moral principle is the most difficult and the most crucial.

The love affair with war crimes that some on the mainstream righthavenever ceases to perplex me. When smaller wars have been waged in which civilian centers are being bombarded, we often hear from this crowd that the problem with Western nations today is that they lack the will to inflict the mass casualties inflicted during WWII bombing attacks, and when challenged about ongoing operations they will say, “Oh yeah, well what about Dresden and Tokyo?” To which I might respond, “Well, what about them? These were unspeakable crimes.”

Many of the same people who preach such insipidly simplistic and irrational messages about fighting and even “ending” evil will be the first to find refuge behind the “complicated” nature of wartime decisions. At least they will do so if it means that they can ignore the real moral complexity of these situations, in which all belligerents are capable of committing war crimes and ought to be held to the same standard. It is this latter point that is really quite simple: if the torture practices authorized by the last administration had been carried out against Americans, we would not hesitate to call them crimes and demand punishment for the guilty, and if the same kinds of bombings were done to our cities by foreign military forces we would not think twice about calling them war crimes. Acknowledging this should not be an occsasion for excessive self-flagellation, but it does have to be acknowledged. Perhaps even more corrupting and dangerous than the abuses of power and wartime excesses themselves is the willingness to minimize or approve of wrongful acts carried out by the government.

P.S. Here is an older post from John Schwenkler to remind us of what it is we’re talking about in this debate.

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34 Responses to The Argument From War Crimes Returns

when challenged about ongoing operations they will say, â€œOh yeah, well what about Dresden and Tokyo?â€ To which I might respond, â€œWell, what about them? These were unspeakable crimes.â€

Stipulating that I agree with you, how can we speak of such a thing being a “crime” without an international legal framework declaring it so? I don’t think the GC or similar cut it in this regard: treaties don’t identify “crimes” beween one state and another, only of individuals. The ICT goes further, in that it at least provides something like a criminal procedure, which really attacks the root of international criminality: open procedures impartially applied against corrupt people acting in secret. But the ICT attacks the heart of a state’s sovereignty, the right of a state to enunciate all laws and punish all crimes in its jurisdiction…
Also, nulla crimen sine poena, and there was scant liltle poena for the firebombing of Dresden, unless you count the Marshall Plan 😉
I think reasonable peopl can conclude that Dresden and Tokyo were atrocities, but why do you you use the word “crime?” Again, I agree with you, but I believe all states should be a party to a limited transnational legal framework that defines certain actions between states as crimes, and the heads of state as liable to criminal sanction. Why do you use the word?

Once upon a time – a long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away – the Official Right was not so accomodating to war crimes. In its May 10, 1958 edition an obscure journal called “National Review” published a piece, “Hiroshima, Assault on a Beaten Foe?” by historian Harry Elmer Barnes which debunked the necessity of the atomic bombings. For that matter, the necessity of the fire bombings or the necessity of an invasion. But that was when National Review was controlled by white supremacists and anti-Semites. I have to go now. The thought police are pounding on the door.

I suppose I am having difficulty seeing a reason to distinguish between an atrocity and a crime. If it is an atrocity, it is a violation of the laws of war, and it would have almost certainly been contrary to international conventions that governed protection of civilians in wartime. Hague conventions predated WWII, and our government was a signatory to these conventions. In one of his posts, John cites from Article 25 of the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare, which prohibits “â€œattack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended.” It seems to me that this means that these bombings were crimes under international law as it was understood at the time. They were also atrocities. I suppose it is possible that something can be morally abhorrent and not be formally illegal, but with these bombings we are faced with things that were already defined as crimes in large measure because they were by their nature atrocities.

I take your point, the meaning of the word “crime” and criminality seems be completely transformed when you put the word “war” before it. I would tend to think that the phrase “war crime” is just a term of art, and doesn’t really have anything to do with “crime,” since the entire concept of a “war crime law,” “war crime prosecutor,” and “war crime court” that operates above and between states isn’t really accepted, and regardless doesn’t at all resemble civil law, civil prosecution etc. To me a crime is strictly an act a state proscribes for its citizens, without regard for morality or abhorrence, and that something isn’t a crime without a legitimate–state sanctioned–process for deciding guilt, and that something isn’t a crime if it isn’t consistently punished.

But I understand other people have different understandings of the word.

We tried Germans and Japanese for “war crimes”, even though prior to Nuremburg there was no genuine international acceptance of the legal notion. It was in many respects just obvious to anyone that what the Germans and Japanese did were war crimes, pure and simple, and they needed to be prosecuted for it. Of course, it’s always easy to prosecute the losers of a war. It’s rather obvious why the allies were never prosecuted for their war crimes: they won the way. If it had gone the other way, and the Germans and Japanese ahd been able to prosecute Truman and others for their war crimes, we would consider that to be mere “vengance”, because of course they would never prosecute their own war criminals. And that is the way it goes.

One can’t much argue with “to the victor goes the right of judgement” in practice. But one can at least point out the sheer hypocrisy of pretending that one’s own war crimes are justified, and not really crimes at all, whereas one’s enemy’s war crimes are dastardly deeds worthy of profound punishment. No legal framework can be effective if it only punishes one class of criminal, and legitimizes another class guilty of the same kind of crime. The simple fact is that the allies in WWII committed numerous war crimes for which they should have been prosecuted, but were instead hailed as heroes. And the same goes for our recent leaders in recent wars.

I strongly agree with your point, and your examples. I also agree that the distinction between “war crimes” and “atrocities” is largely semantic and legalistic.

Speaking as a confessed liberal (but a fan, not a troll), I wonder how you would classify Reagan’s adventures in El Salvador and Nicaragua, in which the US government trained, armed and funded death squads that used rape and mass murder as a tactic against huge numbers of rural civilians. In my view, unsurprising to most readers in light of my confession, there was very little difference between those methods and the atrocities currently being committed by Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the “insurgents” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m not surprised that secular and moral relativistic neo-conservatives present such sick and depraved arguments celebrating the deliberate bombing of civilian targets in Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima and encouraging that the same murderous tactics of “total war” be applied in modern conflicts in places like Lebanon, Gaza, Afghanistan, and Iraq. What is very disconcerting is the large number of self-professed Christians that are fanatical in advocating these barbaric measures in warfare. The just war principles laid out by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas have been all but abandoned, as if these two great Christian scholars were a pair of terrorist appeasing, anti-American liberals. Instead these modern Christians would rather the follow in the footsteps of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and the French Jacobians.

Also, by what right do these neo-conservatives and their fellow travelers claim General Sherman, FDR, or Harry Truman as the ultimate role models for how war is to be fought? What ever happened to using the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and other actual laws for insight into the rules of war? Since when are we to follow personalities over actual laws and principles?

The topic of War Crime elicits a lot of emotional and partisan reaction on all sides. The Neocon’s and the knee-jerk con’s are reacting to what they rightly perceive as the opportunistic use of war crimes verbiage by the left to deconstruct their misbegotten wars of choice. With all due respect, a lot of the writing here reflects a desire for intellectual/moral perfection contra-the neocon’s. Well, it’s never hard to gain the moral high ground from those who have no morals to begin with.

Assigning the term war crime to individual acts is, like it or not, a complicated business. For instance the Atomic Attack on Japan. Japan was indeed on it’s knees at the time of the attacks. (BTW, these were atomic, not nuclear attacks). But two factors that are rarely mentioned come into play here.
1. Japan violated routinely every known aspect of international law in the course of the war. It is not a frivolous question to ask if international outlaws have the same recourse to law as those who at least try to uphold some code of decency. An argument can be made that in war, reciprocity of codes of conduct is central to all that follows. It is my understanding that historically this is what held the whole framework of the law of war together, at least among western civilized combatants. Of course we can and should strive to hold ourselves to higher ideals and I suppose between you and me Christian ones. But as a matter of law, some discrimination between good actors and bad is useful and I would argue, inevitable.

2. The real killer of Japanese at the end of WWII was not atomic bombing but starvation. This is not well understood in the West. The submarine blockade of the Japanese home islands was so complete that the elderly in most Japanese families were reduced to suicide by self starvation in order that children and grandchildren might live. This was a staggering number of people. So despite the motives of some who make the argument now, it ‘s true that the swift ending of the war by atom bomb saved Japanese lives.

The Nuremberg trails gave rise to extra-legal thinking in these matters that haunts us today. By creating expostfacto law to justify the condemnation of the Nazis we have opened ourselves up to a regime of international law based on nothing more than the idealistic boilerplate of the UN.

One of your commenters asks if our backing of the Contras was not a war crime. If backing the anti-communist side of a civil war is a war crime then I suppose I am a war criminal, having helped the Contra’s. I wonder if many of us haven’t lost sight of what war is. To suppose that one can combat any government, much less a vicious communist one like Nicaragua’s without ever overstepping the line, is simply naive.

None of this is to say that the allies didn’t perpetrate acts of war that cannot be justified. Dresden is the prime example. I read accounts in the early 70’s that claimed that allied fighters actually strafed civilians attempting to fee the firestorm. If so this alone would be an atrocity.

Finally, the cultural norms of the actors have to be considered. In the present torture controversy it seems some of the techniques used by the CIA and Military were markedly less tough than the techniques commonly used by our police departments until comparatively recently. I can go into some detail about these but suffice it to say that they went a lot farther than putting an insect in a detainees cell. We have gotten to a place where coercion or any kind is considered a crime against humanity. Perhaps this is fine. But remember that Lincoln’s army of the Potomac practiced flogging.

Most of your argument boils down to saying that war crimes are justifiable in some cases. Fine, make that case at trial. War crimes are still worthy of being called war crimes, regardless of their alleged justification or results.

It’s clear that the nuclear attacks on japan (there’s no distiction between “nuclear” and “atomic”, the fission process being a nuclear process, though of a different kind than fusion) were war crimes, in that they primarly targetted innocent civilians. It would have been different if they had been used against military strongholds, but the opposite was the case. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military value, in fact that was precisely why they were targetted, because there would be no chance that our bombers would be shot down before delivering their payloads. It was the very definition of a defenseless attack on innocent civilians.

Now, to justify that by saying it may have saved lives doesn’t in any way change the status of the act as a war crime. It merely suggests that if your war crimes are monstrous enough, they can get the enemy to surrender. Well, duh. Gheghis Khan used this technique quite successfully as he went about conquering asia. He commonly gave ultimatums that unless his enemies surrendered, he would slaughter every inhabitant. And true to his word, he did so, in several cases killing as many as a million people at a time after conquering. One could argue that this was justified, because after doing this a number of times, many people surrendered, thus “saving lives”. This is an argument in favor of adopting the most brutal and criminal of war policies, because the more brutal we are, the more likely the opposition will surrender, thus “saving lives”. It’s an argument for using nuclear weapons in virtually all wars, because it will bring the enemy to their knees faster, and thus save many lives that would be lost in a long war of attrition, disease, starvation, etc.

You take for granted that war requires war crimes, as in the case of the contras. Well, maybe wars that require the use of war crimes as official policy, as was the case with the Contras, are unjust wars, and we should not be supporting those kinds of actors. There’s no reason to think that the contras couldn’t have succeeded better without resorting to war crimes, in fact I think that would easily have been the case. And in general, US foreign policy in central and south america would have succeeded far more if we had not regularly supported criminal movements and governments that led people to hate us and resent our intrusions, and which often led them to join communist movements in order to oppose us.

The problem, of course, is that the “mainstream right” has become a project of Likud/AIPAC and their neocon propagandists. Given the results(for example) of the two invasions of Lebanon and the Gaza incursion the Krauthammers who are the thought leaders of the GOP must always finds ways to define the war crimes of “our side” out of existence.

The GOP is caught in a trap and can’t abandon its neocon intellectual leadership. That’s one of the reasons why we need to reform the voting systems of the US and allow for the emergence of a multi-party system like Netherlands or Germany or-somewhat ironically-Israel. Range Voting should be implemented on a state-by-state basis for elections for POTUS and Congress. Medium to large states could allocate electoral college votes by PR.

No Conradg, my point is not that “war crimes are justifiable in some cases.” It is that in the to and fro of war, sooner or later our fighters, planners, admirals etc. will do things that in retrospect seem criminal. Sometimes they may be criminal. The war planners of 1945 had very different moral norms than you seem to. They had a war to win against an intractable enemy who played by no rules whatsoever. War crimes may not be justified but they are inevitable.

A secondary point is that the law of nations in regard to war needs to take into account the behavior of all the combatants. Having read the memoirs of many WWII leaders, it’s striking how this principle of the rule of law as a privilege shared by the civilized is almost universal. We are now fighting a sort of shadow war with people who have even less claim on our sympathy or understanding. To hold ourselves in a punctilious manner to every nicety of human rights practice while fighting barbarians is simply masochism.

I’m sorry that you don’t agree with our victory over the reds in Central American. Fortunately we didn’t need you.

Gordianus may be correct that the atomic bombings were, at the least, not materially worse than the starvation imposed by naval blockade. Recall the deaths caused by the Allied blockade in World War One. Richard Frank’s Downfall makes the case that blockade was as bad if not worse in the case of Japan.

I’m not aware of any treaty or precedent that would’ve required the U.S. to allow food supplies past a blockade of Japan. (There may well be such authority; I have no expertise here.) Of course, what the Japanese gov’t did with the food would’ve been beyond our control — they could have reserved it for soldiers.

Nonetheless, one can argue, the Hague Conventions said what they said, and the decision that atomic bombing was less unjust, ultimately, than blockade was not a choice the U.S. should have been free to make. That may be the right answer.

I merely want to suggest that, in the special case of the atomic bombings, and despite Gordianus’s argumentative excesses, the question may be a difficult one.

“…in the to and fro of war, sooner or later our fighters, planners, admirals etc. will do things that in retrospect seem criminal. Sometimes they may be criminal. The war planners of 1945 had very different moral norms than you seem to.”

I hope you are not suggesting that we should judge criminals by their own set of moral norms, rather than our own? I’m sure Ted Bundy would argue that judging him by his own moral norms would be the best way to go about prosecuting him. The simple fact is, hardly any criminals think that what they are doing is wrong. Hitler didn’t think killing Jews was wrong, he felt it was completely justified, and was in fact a great and good thing he was doing for the world. Should we judge him by his own moral norms?

I do understand that Truman and his generals had different moral norms than I do. They wanted to win a war, and they didn’t really care how it was accomplished. They were willing to murder enemy civilians without any regard for the morality of their acts, which to them were always justified by the politics of winning a war and keeping the Russians out of the Pacific front, etc. So they could have cared less about the morals and criminality of murdering Japanese civilians in the process. That doesn’t make them any less murderers and war criminals. It just makes them our murderers and war criminals.

It’s certainly true that one cannot avoid civilian deaths in much of modern warfare. But it’s quite another thing to deliberately target civilians, which is exactly what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as at Dresden and Hamburg, and numerous other cities subjected to strategic bombing, especially fire-bombing. The whole point of these raids was not to hit military targets, but to kill civilians, and thus to “demoralize” the enemy. This is nothing but sheer terrorism. Not only was that criminal, it didn’t even work. It’s been shown since that these bombing campaigns did next to nothing to slow the axis war effort, and it didn’t even demoralize the enemy. In both Germany and Japan, it only harded public sentiment and increased the williness of soldiers to fight to the death.

In Japan, the Japanese had already offered to surrender, with the only condition being a guarantee that the Emporer would not be prosecuted. To force them to give up this one concession, we killed over 100,000 innocent civilians. Is that moral, or is it criminal? Keep in mind of course that we were in a rush to keep the Russians out of the pacific front as well, and dropped the bomb to force the Japanese hand. The notion that the bomb prevented us from enduring a costly invasion of Japan was nonsense. We knew full well the Japanese were ready to surrender, it was just a matter of rushing them into it before the Russians could put their troops into Japan.

As Daniel points out, arguing from even worse war crimes does not in any way excuse lesser crimes. So arguing that the war crime of dropping atom bombs was not as bad as the war crime of forced starvation is hardly demonstrative of anything, other than that the human mind can literally find excuses for anything and everything it does. The purpose of having moral codes is to deflect such excuses away and keep our eyes on what is right in front of us. There really isn’t any controversy over the simple fact that dropping atom bombs on civilians is a war crime. Everything else is just moral obfuscation aimed at letting us do it again some day when it suits us.

In regards to South America, communism was only a serious problem because of the brutal manner in which the people there were being treated by foreign business interests. As has been seen domestically in the US and elsewhere, the “red menace” withers and dies when the workforce is not treated like chattel. But our response to communist movements in South America was largely to support unrestrained murder and torture of the populace.

Anderson, it is my understanding that the Japanese offered to surrender, but with the understanding that the Emperor would remain with both his full powers as head of state and as the head of government. This was totally unacceptable and would have made a nonsense of the whole war aim. It would have been the equivalent of letting Hitler remain in his bunker to run the civil affairs of Germany in exchange for a German surrender. It was not a serious offer but I suppose it serves if your purpose is moral posturing.

The bombing of cities was universal in WWII. So I suppose all the heads of state should have turned themselves in to the UN for prosecution at the cessation of conflict.

Also to Anderson: I regret any argumentative excesses. I do not mean to offend and if I have, I apologize.

Conradg, you are confusing moral codes with law. The law of nations as were understood at the time in question is what is pertinent here. As I said in my previous post, the rules of war were widely understood to apply only between nations who abided by them. You or I might not find this acceptable now but that is how most of our leaders saw it then.

The use of the word criminal to describe our war planners is a misuse of language. A criminal is one who acts outside the law. An Admiral, Ambassador, President etc. operates on our behalf under our law. There was no UN declaration of Human Rights at the time of Hiroshima, nor had there been the Nuremberg trails with their legal precedents. Today we hold national leaders to a sort of nebulous international standard of conduct. Or should I say we hold our own leaders to that standard?

“There really isnâ€™t any controversy over the simple fact that dropping atom bombs on civilians is a war crime. Everything else is just moral obfuscation aimed at letting us do it again some day when it suits us.” As one who survived the Cold War in part because both sides of that conflict held each others populations hostage, I can’t be quite so morally correct as you in this.

If bombing cities and blockade were both out of bounds, precisely how would you have ended the war? Some decision or other had to be made and they all involved massive loss of life. The Japanese were prepared to die for the Emperor. The Japanese Army was massing to repel our invasion. Very large numbers of Japanese were prepared to commit suicide rather than submit to occupation. The Japanese were starving and civil authority was beginning to break down. I’m glad that the decision makers weren’t paralyzed by the knowledge that many years hence moralists would condemn whatever you did as a “crime.”

Perhaps the best way to see all this is that war is in fact a semi-criminal activity engaged in by governments due to our fallen nature. It cannot be engaged in with moral exactitude. We can only try to avoid unnecessary wars while fighting with as little barbarity as possible.

Is the reference to the Magic decrypts of Togo’s correspondence w/ Sato in Moscow?

If so, (1) that was not an offer, it was discussion of a possible offer, overheard by the Americans, and (2) as Richard Frank documents in Downfall, even after Sato clarified that “unconditional surrender” would have to include a guarantee of the emperor’s status, Togo said no such surrender could be considered.

I am a bit unconventional, I think, in regarding the carpet bombings as pretty much straight-up war crimes, while at least being willing to wonder if the shock and horror of the new A-bombs were what it took to shake Japan’s gov’t enough to accede to suing for peace.

Even if that’s the case, I’m not sure that “good results” justify Hiroshima, but it’s something I would plead if I were Truman in the docket.

The japanese were concerned over the allied efforts to bring to trial German leaders who had committed crimes of aggression – i.e., waged war without cause – not just those who had commited atrocities. Seeing as how they worshipped the Emperor as God incarnate, they were not willing to allow this to happen to him. The Emperor was to remain “Head of State” in the same sense that Queen Elizabeth is Head of State of England – meaning with no real powers, just ceremonial. In fact, he was never head of the government except as symbolic government, and did not run things or guide policy. He merely gave his blessings to what those who ran the government wanted to do. Which is why the Japanese were concerned that he might be tried for war crimes.

In fact, the japanese did surrender unconditionally, and yet the Emperor was never put on trial for war crmes, nor was he even deposed. So how can you compare him to Hitler? He remained Emperor and Head of State for the remainder of his lifetime. Would we have allowed Hitler to be Head of State of Germany after the war if he hadn’t killed himself? McCarthur for one recognized how important he was to the Japanese people, and made him a principle player in the occupation and transition to democratic government. So we deliberately killed 100,000 innocent civilians in order to force the Japanese to drop a meaningless condition for surrender that we never even exercised. How is that exactly moral.

As for the notion that there were no “laws on the books” governing these things, that didn’t stop us from putting Germans and Japanese on trial at Nuremburg and elsewhere for what they did during the war, even the mere fact of waging aggressive war itself. So why shouldn’t allied commanders who ordered acts like Hoirshima and Nagasaki be tried for their crimes as well? The word “crime” has more than a merely narrow legal sense. When Ghenghis Khan invaded asia and put innocent civilians to death en masse, are you saying that wasn’t a crime because they were no laws against it by some international body with jurisdiction? According to you then, no atrocity in human history, no matter how horrific, was actually a crime until various international legal treaties appeared in the 20th century. I would say that killing innocent people has always been recognized as a crime, regardless of whether its a crime that has been prosecutable or not.

As for ending the war, there’s this basic way of doing it in war – defeat the enemy on the field of battle, as we did. Indiscriminately bombing cities and killing civilians did not end either war much faster than it would have without committing such war crimes. The Japanese knew they had lost, and were willing to surrender. It would have taken a little negotiating is all, and continued military action. Dropping the atom bomb on a military base would have been enough, and not a war crime. Many at the time even suggested droppiing it on an unihabited island as a demonstration of what we could do.That would have been just as effective as Hiroshima.

Resorting to such theological “explanations” as seeing war as a result of our “fallen nature” doesn’t mean we shouldn’t prosecute war criminals, any more than it means we shouldn’t prosecute murderers and thieves because they too are just acting our our fallen nature. The lack of moral exactitude does not mean we can’t have a system for prosecuting heinous criminal conduct such as the deliberate, conscious mass murder of innocent civilians.

And the notion that “muturally assured desctruction” of mass civilian populations was some kind of moral victory in the cold war is simply madness. Several times we almost killed our entire planet. If we’d listened to our military “experts” during that time, such as during the Cuban missle crisis, we would have.

Now, yes, its true that we should avoid unnecessary wars and fight them with as little barbarity as possible. But it has been known for a very long time that deliberately targetting civilians is out of bounds and thus criminal. We certainly felt that way about the Germans and Japanese who carried out their wars in such a manner. The entire rationale of Nuremberg was to prevent such crimes from occuring in the future by prosecuting those who had violated these moral norms. They simply neglected to prosecute those on our own side who had violated those norms. If the German or Japanese leaders had either firebombed or nuked our cities as we did theirs, they surely would have been prosecuted for it.

Also, there’s a difference between bombing legitimate military targets that happen to be in cities, and targetting cities en masse as was done with the fire-bombing techniques desirgn to kill as many civilians as possible. The madness of that practice led to the madness of targetting civilians with nukes during the cold war, as if that were merely the “logical” way to fight war.

It is simply not true that the Japanese and we had an understanding of the Emperor’s role in post war Japan. The Japanese only dropped their insistence that the Emperor would also lead the government after two atomic bombings. The Emperor did not direct the day to day decision making of the government, but he did have the power to authorize and over-rule his government of the day. He was not a helpless spectator to the replacement of Tojo.

I make clear that I find the Nuremberg trails questionable, both legally and from a practical point of view. Morally, the idea of the Soviets military judges passing judgment on Nazis is black humor.

Crime is always a matter of law. I understand and share your horror at atrocities but the prosecution of crime requires reference to law if it is not to be just a matter of vengeance. You are quite wrong about the Axis Powers trying our leaders in a tribunal. They rarely if ever did that. They just went out and executed those they thought might make trouble for them. It is only we and the Communists that pretended our mortal enemies were criminals.

“Indiscriminately bombing cities and killing civilians did not end either war much faster than it would have without committing such war crimes.” In fact The German victory over both Poland and France was in part due to the tactic of bombing civilian centers in order to create refugees who would clog the roads and interfere with the opponent armies mobility. The allied bombing of populated city rail centers did hasten the collapse of Germany.

By your lights mutually assured destruction during the Cold War may not have been justified, but having been saved by the tactic, I’m willing to let it slide. If the US decided to target only disbursed USSR military assets and the commies chanced an assault on our cities, would that have been more moral in your view?

“But it has been known for a very long time that deliberately targetting civilians is out of bounds and thus criminal.” Actually until the treaty of Westphalia, it was common practice. Populations in walled cities were bombarded without mercy. The norms you want to apply to everyone from Ronald Reagan to Genghis Khan are specifically Western Christian norms. Pretending that the family of man agrees with you on what we all know is criminal is a delusion.

For what little it’s worth, I think the targeting of German population centers was morally wrong. The most you can say for the reasoning behind it was that Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay thought that by depriving German civilians of housing (and their lives) they could cripple the German war machine. This idea may have been the product of faulty intelligence or it may have been just bloody mindedness. I don’t know which.

Japanese cities were a bit different in that Japanese war production was very much diffused in the cities. Still in retrospect targeting Japan’s population centers after a certain point was probably for the sake of pressure on the government. I know that LeMay’s intelligence people were complaining that they were running out of significant targets to bomb by the time the decision to drop the bomb came. And still the Japanese would not give up.

and yet the Emperor was never put on trial for war crmes, nor was he even deposed. So how can you compare him to Hitler?

This argument falls prey to Larison’s point in his next post — failure to prosecute past war crimes does not equal innocence of war crimes.

There is, I believe, a substantial body of evidence that Hirohito was not merely a passive observer of Japan’s militarism and aggression.

Dropping the atom bomb on a military base would have been enough, and not a war crime.

That, I admit, is not an idea I recall having seen before. I wonder why it was not tried. I suspect the goal was to put civilian pressure on the gov’t, on the theory that “the people” would rise up. That of course does not legitimate the bombing of cities.

Many at the time even suggested droppiing it on an unihabited island as a demonstration of what we could do.That would have been just as effective as Hiroshima.

Now, that I have never agreed with, simply because the bombs were too new. There had been exactly one A-bomb explosion before Hiroshima. Even if the scientists were convinced it would work, Truman and his cabinet would have to have feared convening Japanese observers (& probably those of other countries as well) to watch a failed test. The morale-building effect on Japan would have been dreadful.

Again, you are confused about the role the Emporer played in the Japanese government. He was not the leader of the government, he was its symbolic head of state. Technically, in theory, he had the power to approve or disapprove of the policies of those who ran the government, In practice, he played an entirely subordinate role and simply gave his titular blessings to the government’s course of action. Just as Queen Elizabeth technically has the power to override any government, or refuse to seat a Prime Minister and party she disapproves of, but never exercises that power. So the negotiations about leaving the Emperor in place had nothing to do with who would actually be in charge of the government. The Japanese were willing to have a full allied occupation with the government in the hands of the allied powers, as long as the Emperor was left in his titular monarchial status. And in fact that is exactly what happened. McCarthur took control of the government, but left the Emperor as its titular head of state. In otther words, we gained exactly nothing in the way of actual concessions from what the Japanese proposed to us before Hiroshima.

I understand that you find the Nuremburg trials questionable. But you have lost that argument to history. The trials occurred, they have been accepted as legal, even though ex-post facto, and defendents were executed or served time in prison. My point is that there is no legal excuse therefore for not bringing allied leaders to trial for their war crimes as well. The only excuse for that is political – to the victor goes the right to judge the vanquished.

And no, crime is not always a matter of law, especially the further one goes back in history when legal systems were not terribly comprehensive or fair. It is also a matter of ethics, morality, and common sense. Long before Westphalia, I’m sure ordinary people considered the acts of warriors like Ghenghis Khan to be criminal, if unenforceable. The victims of such attrocities I’m sure felt that it was an example of criminal behavior, against the native laws of God and man. You are just playing word games and I think you know it. But even if one argues under your system of legal frameworks, the Nuremburg trials themselves demonstrated a legal framework for trying war criminals in WWII that has been almost universally accepted, and made the basis for all war crimes proceedings since. So in that regard you have no basis for not considering war crimes committed during WWII as not being “criminal”.

Also, you are aware that German leaders were tried at Nuremburg for the crimes of invading Poland and France as you describe? So those acts were indeed considered war crimes at Nuremburg, not just because they targetted civilians, but because they were acts of unprovoked aggression. That they worked to produce a speedy surrender had more to do with the surprise and speed of the attack, and yes, the general confusion they created, which overwhelmed all their defenses, than any kind of desire on the part of the French or Polish governments to stop the killing of their civilians. And as mentioned earlier, attacks on such targets in cities as railroad centers and tracks, even if they resulted in civilian losses, would be legal. But clearly the mass incendiary bombings of cities like Dresden were not necessary to accomplish such a goal, and were clearly used to kill as many civilians as possible.

One aspect of this in the European theater which bear mentioning is that much of these strategic bombings against German civilians were pushed by the British air commanders, who wanted blood revenge pure and simple for the air attacks on England during the war, including the V2 attacks. They knew very well that it had no real strategic value, they just wanted to kill a lot of Germans, because the German air force had killed a lot of English. American air commanders tended to be opposed to these operations, but didn’t want to get in the way of the British, so they went along with it. So lets not pretend that this was really some kind of military campaign.

As for Lemay, the man was a sick bastard. He’s the same guy who wanted to use nukes in Vietnam. Him of the “bomb them back into the stone age” mentality. Is this really anything but a criminal mind in charge of advanced weaponry?

MAD was simply insane. Fortunately, we never got down to actually implementing it. And really, what would you do if the Soviets lauched their first strike attack on us? What would really be accomplished by murdering all their civilians too? We’d all be dead anyway. A number of American Presidents have said they didn’t think they could have gone thourgh with it, they didn’t want that much blood on their hands. But we all had to pretend it was perfectly logical and sane. Murdering one another’s entire country, and possibly the whole world, for what exactly?

I’m glad you admit that targeting population centers was morally wrong. But when a moral wrong means murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, it becomes a criminal wrong also. Otherwise, what’s the point of morality? If we are just to shrug our heads at murder, what’s gone wrong with our heads?

Anderson, regarding the notion of a demonstration of the atom bomb, this idea was put forward by a number of people, particularly the scientists who worked on the bomb. Truman rejected the idea. He wanted the maximum emotional impact that would come from witnessing the slaughter of so many innocent civilians. The notion of a failed test would have been no more of a failure than a failed bombing. And yes, several military sources suggested using the bomb on military sources, but they were rejected also out of fear that the bomber carring the Bomb might be shot down. Hiroshima was decided on months in advance, and several practice runs were taken dropping a dummy bomb. Hiroshima was exempted from strategic bombing during this time so that it would be pristine at the time of the atom bombing. This gave civilians a false sense of security, that their city, having no military targets, was being spared from the horrors of the war.

The Emperor’s role in the government was not entirely passive. He was not opposed to the war plans of the government, and was even a bit enthusiastic about them. But he excercised no actual authority in the process, and was fully submissive to their plans. Things might have been different if he had voiced a passivist, anti-war attitude, and he perhaps could have stopped the war if he’d wanted to, but he might have suffered an “accident” as well. Tojo, the Prime Minister, and his cabinet are the ones who ran the country.

Conradg. Your equating of the role of the Emperor with that of Queen Elizabeth is simply ahistorical. The Emperor approved of the attack on Pearl Harbor and insisted on the sacking of Tojo. The Emperor had power.

This is the crux of our disagreement.

“I understand that you find the Nuremburg trials questionable. But you have lost that argument to history. The trials occurred, they have been accepted as legal, even though ex-post facto, and defendents were executed or served time in prison. My point is that there is no legal excuse therefore for not bringing allied leaders to trial for their war crimes as well. The only excuse for that is political – to the victor goes the right to judge the vanquished.”

I have not lost the argument to history. WE have lost the argument. By participating in an ex post facto sham trial, we have assented to a “legal” tribunal law based on sentiment. Frankly, your whole argument proceeds from the assumption that there is some universal sentiment against what you deplore and that this universal sentiment somehow constitutes law. It does not. Law defines law.

Since you keep bringing Genghis Khan up, I wonder if you have read the Old Testament. The wholesale slaughter of populations is actually in at least one of the founding documents of our civilization. The wholesale slaughter of the Gauls by Julius Caesar is not studied as an indictment of Rome. Strange as it may seem, the norms of people of different eras differ from yours. I’m sure that the use of terror tactics by the Khan caused great fear. That is what they were intended to do. But to impute adherence to your own own moral scruples to populations in antiquity based on this is a nonsense.

I cannot reason with an argument based emotion. Squeamishness is not law, nor is it a reliable guide to policy.

Gordianus, if law defines law, then the Nuremburg trials, the Geneva Conventions, the whole international retinue of laws on war crimes, including ex-post facto indictments, are the law of the land. You don’t have to like it, you can dissent all you like, but its the law. Period. My point is merely that if that is the law under which the Nuremburg trials were held, and that law has been upheld as valid every since, it makes not legal sense not to have put allied leaders on trial for their war crimes as well. It only makes political sense.

And yes, I’m aware of the long history of massacres and slaughter from ancient times up to the present. And yes, those acts were crimes. I can assure you that every slaughtered innocent in those times felt exactly the same about their own slaughter as any present day victim of slaughter or murder does. Human criminality is not changed by time and circumstance, it’s only a question of whether the killers can be brought to justice. In the old days, justice meant going over and slaughtering those who slaughtered you, just as criminal justice meant blood feuds between familes and tribes. The whole institution of criminal law was created to prevent the perpetuation of blood feuds. And war crimes laws are there to prevent the perpetuation of similar blood feuds in the arena of war. That’s the whole point of puttihg aggressors and slaughterers on trial – to put an end to the cycle of such crimes by subjecting them to a legal process. Otherwise, there is no end to it.

And to pretend that war crimes have no emotional element to them, that murder is just something like jay-walking, straying over some imaginary line, is to be so completely disassociated from the reality of what these crimes represent as to be incapable of actually dealing with the conflicts involved. If your use of reason is incompatible with emotion, it is a false use of reason, that’s for sure. And to use a word like “squeamishness” to describe the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of human beings? What kind of depraved shadow of reason is that indicative of?

“The bombing was a surprise (I think we dropped vague leaflets in advance); a dud bomb would have been hardly noticed. A demonstration could not be a surprise.”

Surprise wasn’t really an important issue, I think. No one could have imagined such an event anyway, without seeing its results. And a dud bombing would have been no worse than a dud demonstration. In other words, it would have no effect. And the dud bomb would have been found and recovered by theJjapanese in any case, which would have been much worse than a failed demonstration. And really, the chance of a dud wasn’t really a serious issue. The scientists had great confidence in the reliability of their work, especially after the first test bomb.

“I am afraid that the main reason the bomb was used at Hiroshima is that our previous bombings of cities had inured us to the slaughter of civilians, at least when accomplished from the air.”

This is terribly true, and one of the primary reasons not to even go down this road. After a while, the most horrible actions begin to seem routine and rational, and even worse things begin to seem reasonable as well. This is one of the primary reasons not to go down the road of war crimes, because of what it does not just to the enemy, but to us as moral beings. We become the very monsters we had originally determined to fight off, and don’t even notice it. If the war had gone on much longer, if the Germans or Japs had developed nukes as well, the whole world would eventually have been destroyed, and it all would have seemed completely rational and reasonable. As of course later become official military doctrine during the cold war.

“That said, I am not sure what a humane resolution to the war with Japan could have looked like, given the extreme obduracy of the militarist government.”

As of August 5, 1945, accepting the surrender of Japan would have worked out exactly the same as it was after the atomic bombs, in that we never deposed or tried the Emperor anyway.

Also, regarding Gordianus’ arguments about the Emperor, I’ve acknowledged that the Emperor had vestigal power (as does Queen ELizabeth, btw), but in reality he had no actual power. His dismissal of Tojo was, again, merely a formality requested by the high command. He merely went through the motions, just as Queen Elizabeth goes through the motions after every election to formally inviite the winner to form a government. Technically she could as someone else to do so, she has that power, but she never exerciises it.

The point is, everyone on both sides knew that the Emperor was not the leader of the war effort for Japan as Hitler was for Germany. He was pretty much just a young puppet-stooge. So there was no issue as you are trying to make it out that of course we couldn’t allow the Emperor to stay on the throne. Because, of course, we did just that, even when we could have deposed him and put him on trial for war crimes. So your argument, which you say is the crux of our disagreement, simply has no grounding in reality. I would agree with you if he really were the Japanese equivalent of Hitler, but he’s more the Japanese equivalent of George VI – yes, both were kept abreast of and approved the actions of their governments, and formally presided over the appointments and dismissals of government officials, but neither really decided anything, and were certainly not the moving force of the war efforts on either side. So it was a meaningless issue to drop an atom bomb over, as was clearly demonstrated in the occupation that followed.

As of August 5, 1945, accepting the surrender of Japan would have worked out exactly the same as it was after the atomic bombs, in that we never deposed or tried the Emperor anyway.

I think we agree more than we disagree, so I hesitate to keep flogging this horse; but the subject is important enough that I am happy to learn more about it.

I’m just not aware of any evidence that Japan’s government was open to even “unconditional surrender + guarantee of the imperial dignity.” That’s the compromise that was offered and accepted after Nagasaki, but if Japan made any such offer before August 9, I don’t know of it.

“My point is merely that if that is the law under which the Nuremburg trials were held, and that law has been upheld as valid every since, it makes not legal sense not to have put allied leaders on trial for their war crimes as well. It only makes political sense.”

You seem think that when a tribunal makes up law as the tribunal at Nuremberg did, that we as a country are obliged to assent. A more patriotic view would be that having engaged in a farce in 1945, we can decline participation in future and rely instead on our own Code of Military Conduct in deciding the guilt of innocence of our personnel. We have tried and convicted our own in the past and will continue to do so.

Your argument reminds me of the young friend of Thomas Moore who would tare down every legal impediment in pursuit the Devil, only to find that those impediments are the only thing protecting us from the Devil.

If you want to believe that the Emperor was not an official with power in the Japanese government, despite the open testimony of the Japanese themselves, then so be it. I do find it revealing that you continue to claim that the war was over and all we had to do was accept Japanese terms as you, rather than the Japanese, understand them to have a peaceful occupation. Surely this is to make up a false history in the service of your indictment of our war leaders.

“You seem think that when a tribunal makes up law as the tribunal at Nuremberg did, that we as a country are obliged to assent.”

When we are the ones who created the tribunal and gave it our full backing, yes, we are obliged to assent.

Nuremburg did not tear down the law, it built it up. Comparisons to Sir Thomas Moore are simply facetious. By the way, SIr Thomas Moore put a number of people to death simply for being of the Catholic faith. He is the one who used “the law” to pursue the Devil, and made a travesty of justice in the process. That it came back to bite him on his own ass is not something that could not have been predicted. He’s not some kind of hero of law and justice as he like to portray himself, but perverted law and justice in the pursuit of “heretics”.

And I never claimed the Emperor had no power, or didn’t participate in the government. He certainly did have blood on his hands. But everyone knew he was a weakling going along with those who actually ran things. He was no Hitler as you claim, and everyone knew that. So the notion that we were ever going to try him for war crimes is facetious, expectially the notion that it should have been some kind of deal-breaker. And you still ignore the fact that, even while we tried and executed a good number of Japanese leaders, we didn’t even depose the Emperor.

My point about the negotiations for surrender is that we didn’t need the atom bomb to make them happen. It was inevitable by that point. We used the atom bomb to force the negotiations to come to an end in a matter of days, solely because we wanted the war to end before the Russians entered the conflict and began to do in the east what they had already shown themselves doing in the west. If anything was impeding the surrender negotiations, it was the Russians, who were independently talking with the Japanese and trying to draw them out, keeping the war alive so that they could enter and gain a political foothold in the japanese empire, including japan itself. Russia wanted a japanese invasion, so that they could co-occupy Japan as they did in Germany. The citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not killed to save lives, but as part of a geopolitical power play.

Actually Saint Thomas Moore condemned heretics within the Catholic faith and entirely in accordance with the law of the time. Your lack of understanding of this point and your childish denunciation of a great man, has finally exhausted my patience. Your desire to have people of different historical epochs adhere to your rather precious sense of justice just isn’t worth the candle.

Here’s the account of Thomas Moore’s campaign against heretics from Wikipedia:

His early actions against the Protestants included aiding Wolsey in preventing Lutheran books from being imported into England. He also assisted in the production of a Star Chamber edict against heretical preaching, treating heretics mercilessly. During this time most of his literary polemics appeared. After becoming Lord Chancellor of England, More set himself the following task:â€œ Now seeing that the king’s gracious purpose in this point, I reckon that being his unworthy chancellor, it appertaineth … to help as much as in me is, that his people, abandoning the contagion of all such pestilent writing, may be far from infection. â€

More is commemorated with a sculpture at the late 19th-century Sir Thomas More Chambers, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice, Carey Street, London.

In June 1530 it was decreed that offenders were to be brought before the King’s Council, rather than being examined by their bishops, the practice hitherto. Actions taken by the Council became ever more severe. In 1531, Richard Bayfield, a graduate of the University of Cambridge and former Benedictine monk, was burned at Smithfield for distributing copies of the New Testament.[8]

Further burnings followed at More’s instigation, including that of the priest and writer John Frith in 1533. In The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, yet another polemic, More took particular interest[citation needed] in the execution of Sir Thomas Hitton, describing him as “the devil’s stinking martyr”.[9]

Rumors circulated during and after More’s lifetime concerning his treatment of heretics; John Foxe (who “placed Protestant sufferings against the background of … the Antichrist”)[10] in his Book of Martyrs claimed that More had often used violence or torture while interrogating them. A more recent Evangelical author, Michael Farris, also used Foxe’s book as a reference in writing that in April 1529 a heretic, John Tewkesbury, was taken by More to his house in Chelsea and so badly tortured on the rack that he was almost unable to walk. Tewkesbury was subsequently burned at the stake.[11] More himself refuted these charges throughout his life, swearing ‘as helpe me God’ that he had never used torture as a method of interrogation. He was not a man falsely to invoke the deity and it can be believed that the heretics he detained in his household suffered ‘neuer … so much as a fyllyppe on the forehead’.” [12]

Now, whether this is all “in accordance with the law at the time” is not the issue. It probably was. Which only goes to show that the law of the time violated basic human rights. Which of course you think don’t actually exist. But it doesn’t take much of a liberal to see that what Moore did was criminal, using the law of the time as a shield. Not to mention how these acts are of course a violation of the most basic Christian moral codes Moore was supposedly defending.

Passing laws which allow for grotesque butchery, murder, torture, etc., does not bind everyone to respect such actions as “legal”. If so, then all the murders of the Soviet, Nazi, and Maoist eras were perfectly legal and we have nothing to complain about in them, we are the ones who are guilty of trying to impose our own liberal values on their legal traditions. So sorry to have offended any Nazis out there.